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I'm not sure if both of those are necessary - i think it's just one of them.

LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH=/path/to/mesa/lib/gallium is always needed, this is the location where your r300_dri.so is.
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/mesa/lib is needed for mesa's libGL.so, however usually your system stock libGL.so is sufficient.

Comment

This analysis confirms that performance is an important issue the gallium3d drivers need to address. Gallium 3d developers have implemented more and more features to their drivers and that is great, but sometimes I think that this has been at the cost of performance (which is far behind proprietary drivers).
Also, I am curious of how much attention do older hardware drivers get. Maybe this is not an issue for some, but here in third world countries we run a lot of older hw in our machines.
Anyway I am confident that these performance issue will be resolved. =)

Merry Christmas.

Comment

This analysis confirms that performance is an important issue the gallium3d drivers need to address. Gallium 3d developers have implemented more and more features to their drivers and that is great, but sometimes I think that this has been at the cost of performance (which is far behind proprietary drivers).
Also, I am curious of how much attention do older hardware drivers get. Maybe this is not an issue for some, but here in third world countries we run a lot of older hw in our machines.
Anyway I am confident that these performance issue will be resolved. =)

Comment

Bug reports that generate revenue maintain the tester's income and interest, as well as awareness in the community. In the graphics community a lot of the developers read Phoronix so the message isn't being lost (as evidence, it looks like they already found this regression).

Comment

Gallium 3d developers have implemented more and more features to their drivers and that is great, but sometimes I think that this has been at the cost of performance (which is far behind proprietary drivers).

I don't think the developers knowingly implement anything which hurts performance, except in cases where frequently used cases are sped up at the expense of a less common case which gets slowed down.

It's more likely that the developers implemented a new feature, application runtime logic saw the new feature and used it, but for that particular application/card/driver combination using the new feature is actually slower than running without the feature. Game developers do often put heuristics in which help to choose the right code paths depending on GPU/CPU/driver but they tend to be backward looking and have trouble dealing with a driver that is constantly evolving.

Also, I am curious of how much attention do older hardware drivers get. Maybe this is not an issue for some, but here in third world countries we run a lot of older hw in our machines.

Since open source developers often start as users who "get fed up and decide to take matters into their own hands" I imagine you will see more developers appearing in those areas as well. Open source projects tend to be "self correcting" that way, although the high learning curve for GPU drivers does make it harder for new developers to step in as existing developers move onto other projects.